Great Lakes Map 1744 Regional Print - Detroit, Chicago, Lake Superior

Jacques-Nicolas Bellin prepared this map of the Great Lakes in 1744 to accompany Pierre-Francois-Xavier de Charlevoix's Histoire et description generale de la Nouvelle France, the account the Jesuit scholar compiled after a royal commission to document New France and chart a route to the Pacific, a book Thomas Jefferson later owned and praised as essential reading on French North America. Compiled from the manuscript surveys of military engineer Chaussegros de Lery, Bellin's map was a genuine milestone in the region's cartographic record, marking the earliest appearance in print of both Detroit and the port of Chicago, alongside a set of mythical islands in Lake Superior that other mapmakers went on copying for the next hundred years. This is the first obtainable state of the engraving, preceded only by a proof copy from 1742 noted by later bibliographers but essentially unobtainable today.

Detroit appears here in one of its earliest cartographic depictions, already recognizable as the strategic strait-side post the French had fortified in 1701 to control traffic between Lake Erie and the upper lakes. Chicago shows up as a small but clearly marked port at the foot of Lake Michigan, decades before it would grow into anything resembling a city, its significance owed entirely to the portage connecting the Great Lakes watershed to the Mississippi system. Michigan itself is rendered with a wholly fictitious mountain range across its interior, a Bellin invention later, better-surveyed maps would eventually correct. Indigenous nations, French mission stations and early forts crowd the spaces between these points, reflecting how thoroughly Jesuit missionary networks, rather than colonial settlement, structured French knowledge of the region at this date.

A rewarding gift for anyone with ties to Detroit or Chicago's earliest French-era history, or for a collector tracing how these cities first entered the printed record. TheMapVault also carries Bellin's considerably larger 1745 Great Lakes map, the expanded, rarer first-state sheet he produced the following year using fresh survey data from La Verendrye's western expeditions; this 1744 Charlevoix-atlas printing is the smaller, earlier original from which that later map grew, and the one that actually introduced Detroit and Chicago to European cartography for the first time. It's offered unframed, in the full range of nine sizes as the rest of the collection.